My name is Kyi.
And I am the last hope of a dead race.
The skies of Venus don't scream. They whisper.
Where other planets roar with life, this place sits silent.
No cities. No traffic. No stars visible through the thick amber sky.
Just me. Just us. Just the dust.
I am a Victinion.
One of the last.
Maybe the very last that matters.
Our race was born with a gift that terrified even the stars—instant adaptation.
Stab us? We harden.
Drown us? We breathe water.
Blind us? We learn to see with sound.
Our bodies respond to threats in real-time.
We are nature's perfect improvisation.
But for all our brilliance, we could never escape one thing:
Time.
We live for one year. Exactly one.
No adaptation could save us from that countdown.
We were born dying.
Except me.
I was born with a mutation.
One that allowed me to adapt even to that fatal flaw.
I stopped aging eleven months into my life.
And just… didn't die.
My body shifted in defiance of time.
And just like that, I became something else.
A miracle.
Or a curse.
Depending on who you asked.
---
When my people discovered I wouldn't die, they didn't celebrate.
They prepared.
They gathered every scrap of knowledge, every dangerous chemical, every hostile environment they could simulate. They pushed my body to its limits. Electroshock evolution. Poison-bath conditioning. Atmospheric compression drills.
They forced me to adapt again and again.
Until I was stronger than all of them.
Until I had absorbed every survival tactic in the book—and several that weren't.
Some Victinions broke their minds trying to speed up my growth.
Some sacrificed parts of themselves for experiments.
Some smiled as their bodies failed, whispering,
"At least she'll live."
And then, only six remained.
Six weak Victinions.
Not warriors. Not strategists.
Just the soft ones. The quiet ones.
The ones who didn't adapt well.
They were supposed to die first.
Instead, they became my guardians.
---
"KYI! Stop staring dramatically into space and eat your mineral paste!"
A shrill voice cracked through the air like a broken alarm clock.
It was Joma, the most annoyingly motherly of the six.
He waddled over with a bowl of something brown and shiny.
"I'm photosynthesizing," I muttered. "Leave me alone."
"You're being stubborn, not solar-powered. Just eat."
I groaned and scooped a spoonful into my mouth.
It tasted like boiled batteries.
"Disgusting," I said.
"Survival food rarely gets gourmet reviews," Joma replied, puffing his tiny chest.
---
That was my life.
Venus. A barren world where I train, meditate, and get yelled at for skipping meals.
Every morning, I spar with automated drones calibrated to galactic warfare levels.
Every afternoon, I run simulation loops of enemy species and extreme worlds.
Every evening, I patrol the decayed infrastructure of what was once a Victinion outpost.
I've spent my entire life preparing.
Preparing to invade a world.
To repopulate our race.
To find a planet, claim it, and give birth to the second generation of Victinions.
But truthfully?
I don't know how to be a mother.
I don't even know how to be alive.
---
There are nights when I climb the highest spire on the planet.
Mount Voxine—a cracked tower of obsidian and relic satellite dishes.
I sit there, watching the sky ripple with radioactive clouds and aurora sparks.
It's quiet.
And for a moment, I forget I'm supposed to save a species.
I ask the sky:
"What am I waiting for?"
And the wind replies:
"Someone worth waiting for."
---
Today, the air shifted.
It's faint. But I feel it.
A disturbance in the galaxy. Something far away, shaking the pulse of distant stars.
It travels like a ripple through my bones. Not pain. Not fear.
A calling.
Something has changed.
And I know it in my gut:
This silence… is about to break.
My story is no longer one of waiting.
It's one of movement.
And for the first time,
I want to go.